Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Check out my new little friend

Serendipity is my friend today.

In a distracted moment this evening, I wanted to run Notepad on my laptop to put some quick & dirty notes in.  For some reason, I didn't use my ActiveWords "notes" trigger, but decided to go to the start menu and use the Run... command to launch Notepad.Logo_coolpad_xsm

However, instead of typing "Notepad" on the run line, I typed www.notepad.com and found myself looking at a veritable treasure trove of great HTML tools.  Helloooo Notepad.com!

For starters:

  • a utility to generate html and javascript that will mask your email address from harvester "spiders"
  • a utility that makes it easy to find the HTML codes for colors so you don't have to futz around in a paint program

But wait - there's more!

There is a bunch of very useful stuff in the way of HTML tutorials, geared toward new and intermediate HTML coders.  Includes basic coding, tables, scripting, fonts, and a whole lot more.

Sometimes mistakes pay off.  Enjoy.

Read More

Comment Conversation Done Better: Never Work Alone

Well, it's the end of day one for our Never Work Alone project, and I've just posted the first summary post on our blog. The scenario we discussed was this one:

A customer comes into a business and asks to buy a product and bill them in a certain way. The person at the counter didn't know how to bill the customer for the product in that way. The customer got frustrated and took their business elsewhere.

The first post is a good example of the kind of discussion you can expect from Never Work Alone, and we would love to have more people involved. So, come on over, discover our insights and get involved in this new endeavour of ours.

And why not do us a favor and pass it along to others if you like what you see?

Read More

Comment Conversation Done Better: Never Work Alone

If you work in a corporate environment, you may find yourself in situations where you really wish you had a sounding board so you could either ask for advice or float ideas and get feedback.

Well, wish no longer. Bren of Slacker Manager, Skip of Random Thoughts from a CTO, and I are happy to announce that we've established a resource to provide community based assistance to all of us in corporate environments, particularly those of us in management and leadership roles. This new resource is called Never Work Alone. Watercooler

What’s Never Work Alone all about?
We’ve all been through “trial by fire” management situations, and have faced difficult management and leadership dilemmas at various points in our careers. As active participants in the brain trust on the internet, we also understand the tremendous power of Community.

The goal of Never Work Alone is to provide a community for managers and leaders to share their experiences and challenges, help each other grapple with issues, learn from each other, and advance the state of the art in enlightened leadership.

How Does It Work?
We’re launching a blog and a Google group. The Google group is at http://groups.google.com/group/neverworkalone. Initially, the blog (http://neverworkalone.typepad.com) will be a weekly summary of a situation that’s reflected upon in the Google group.

We’ll solicit situation ideas via this email address: neverworkalone@gmail.com.

Each week we’ll select a situation and post it to the Google group. Group members can offer suggestions for how to handle the situation. Each week we’ll summarize the situation and responses on the blog, crediting the appropriate respondents and including links to their blogs/websites.

Of course, we fully expect that the Google group won’t be used exclusively for going over the situations. We encourage folks to go ahead and post what they’ve got and see what comes back. We’re doing the structured approach so that people with limited time, but who’d like to participate, will know where to focus their energy.

So come on in, check it out, participate, and let us know how we can make this better!

Read More

Burned out minds yield burned out results

In one of my periodic sweeps to catch up on my Bloglines subscriptions, I stopped by Phil Gerbyshak’s “Make it Great!” blog today, and found a very insightful article on recharging your batteries.  As I’ve written in the past, I’m one of those who really needs my “recharge time.”

Phil breaks this down into a formul of the “4 R’s.”  They are:  Rest, Reflect, Read, and Relax.  These certainly resonate with me, and I realized that I’ve not taken enough time to Rest and Relax lately.  I’ve been doing plenty of Reflecting and Reading, but just haven’t been making as many “a-ha” connections I usually do.

In other words, I’ve been working hard this week, but haven’t been getting the full benefit of that work because my batteries were a bit run down.  This evening I feel more energized and creative.

Skates_1After reading Phil’s post, I realize I'm reaping the benefits of spending all afternoon ice skating with two of my kids (the third went to Build-A-Bear with my wife).

So, check out what Phil has to say.  And don’t forget to use all 4 of the R’s.

Read More

Danger Quicksand is now on Amazon.com!

Arrow_sign_lIf you bounced here from my old site - search for the topic you were looking for to the left.

Hello, and welcome to my blog's new home.  If you arrived here via a link from another site or a Google search, you can still find your article by using the Google search box on the left hand side of this page (assuming you're using your browser and not an RSS reader.

I've moved over to TypePad, and the address is http://genuinecuriosity.typepad.com

Meanwhile, here's a checklist to get you up-to-date on my new address:

  • Update your RSS reader to find the new feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/genuinecuriosity (autodiscover will find this if you just point your reader at the main pageand if you were already using my feedburner feed, you're fine).
  • Update any bookmarks to reflect the new address.
  • If you are a fellow blogger and have been kind enough to include me in your blogroll or link list, please update the address to point at my new address.

Thanks for your understanding about this migration.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to migrate comments and trackbacks from the old site to the new. 

Read More